Mass culture is dead

“The death of mass culture and the rise of plenitude makes for lots of little social and cultural distinctions. The possibility of niche marketing does something like the same. Customization everywhere means that we now make distinctions where before we could or would not. Some part of the world, the local world, is parsing ever more finely. Blogging has replaced 10,000 journalists with 1,000,000 journalists.”

for marketing people, it’s easy to think back to the days when it wasn’t like this. The days when we got a brief, we did an ad, we bought media, and the ad ran. It’s easy, because we’re still working like that. And, for now it’s still working. Media departments are really good at getting GRPs.

But how long will it last? If mass culture is dead, then is mass media? Or, is that memo a little early? Is mass culture still kicking?

Here’s what I think. I think the basics of marketing still apply. Just because you want to use Twitter to tell people about something, doesn’t mean you don’t need a plan. If you convince your client to embrace Facebook, MySpace, to write a blog or produce a podcast, it should all still fit into the plan in some way. Just because there are a bunch of new tools (micro media tools?), doesn’t mean they should be used.